Published: Sunday March 1, 2009 MYT 9:41:00 AM

British explorers depart for North Pole

TORONTO (AP): A team of British explorers boarded a light aircraft in northern Canada and were dropped off on Arctic sea ice Saturday, kick-starting their three-month trek to the North Pole to measure the thickness of floating sea ice.

Officials at the team's headquarters in London said explorers Pen Hadow, Ann Daniel and photographer Martin Hartley made the six-hour flight from base camp at Resolute Bay in the Canadian Arctic to begin their first day of trekking approximately 11 kilometers (6 miles) over ice.

They flew to a point 81.5 degrees north and 130 degrees west to start the survey, Rod Macrae, spokesman for the team, told The Associated Press. The team was scheduled to fly out Friday but their departure was delayed because they required more time to test survival and surveying equipment.

During their 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) expedition, which will also include swimming in freezing open water en route to the North Pole, the team will take measurements of water, ice and snow levels in the Arctic using portable, ice-penetrating radar. The data will be sent back to scientists at the U.S. Postgraduate Naval School in Monterey, California, using satellite communications equipment developed specifically for the project.

The data will be used to help scientists get a more accurate prediction of when sea ice in the North Pole will completely melt and not refreeze seasonally as part of an effort to further understand climate change, said lead explorer Hadow in a statement Saturday.

"There is such an urgent need for more ground-truthing data about the permanent floating sea ice. If, as scientists tell us, the ice is thinning quickly, then it should set alarm bells ringing around the world ... Personally I'd say the loss of such a magnificent, but precarious, feature on the surface of the planet would be a tragedy," said Hadow, who became the first person to trek solo and unsupported without any resupplies from northern Canada to the North Pole in 2003.

The retreat of Arctic summer sea-ice in recent years has been dramatic and there are now fears that it is thinning too. The past two summers, in particular, have had record low coverage by mid-September.

Hadow said that there is no instrumentation on satellites at the moment that can measure ice thickness, so it takes a polar expedition to obtain the data. The team will check weather conditions three times a day, drill into the ice to measure thickness 10 times a day, check water temperatures, salt levels, and flow, and take radar measurements every 10 centimeters.

Hadow said the survey does not have a specific hypothesis, but that the data collected will contribute toward validating current models of melting sea ice developed by Professor Wieslaw Maslowski, a science adviser to the survey. His current model projections suggest that the ocean's ice may fully melt by 2013, according to the statement released by the team Saturday.

Each day, the team will trek for 75 minutes, then stop for food and fuel. They will usually burn 7,500 calories a day, but can only carry about 6,000 calories of food a day, said Hadow.

Daniels, 44, acknowledged some of the other obstacles the team will face on their arduous trek.

"We'll encounter many challenges on the Arctic Ocean ... huge ridges, lots of open water, lots of open ice ... polar bears ... and of course the cold," she said, mentioning the below-freezing temperatures. "We'll just have to keep going and surviving out there."

Daniels also noted that they will be traveling on a moving crust of ice, which poses another set of challenges.

"You're constantly going east, west, and many occasions you are going south ... one time we went to bed and we drifted back the whole day's journey," she said.

Daniels said that she would miss soap the most on her trip.

"We don't wash or have any sort of hygienic regime with products," she said. "The only other luxury I miss is warmth."

The team hopes to have results ready for an international conference on climate change being held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December 2009.

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